Police group pushing lighter penalties

The San Antonio City Council on Thursday unanimously approved a $16.6 million contract to outfit the San Antonio Police Department and park police with a "full complement" of body-worn cameras. Chief William McManus told the council that the technology will bring a level of accountability not only to police officers but also to the general public.

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A newly formed group of more than 130 top law enforcement officials called for reforms Wednesday in the criminal justice system, targeting lower incarceration rates and reduced penalties, marking a dramatic shift from decades past when politicians and police alike espoused tough-on-crime policies.

The group, Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, a nationwide organization of police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and attorneys general, plans to meet with President Barack Obama on Thursday.

“Good crime control policy does not involve arresting and imprisoning masses of people,” Garry McCarthy, superintendent of the Chicago Police Department and co-chair of the new group, said, in a statement. “It involves arresting and imprisoning the right people. Arresting and imprisoning low-level offenders prevents us from focusing resources on violent crime.”

Inimai Chettiar, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which helped form the new group, said the call for reforms came from a “surprising new voice.”

“If you thought, if five or 10 years ago, a bunch of the most law-and-order [people] would come together and stand side by side, and said they called for an end to mass incarceration — because it didn’t work — the idea of that happening, even a short time ago, would have been unthinkable.”

San Antonio Police Chief William McManus, who just returned to the police department earlier this month, said that while he’s not involved in Thursday’s meeting with Obama, he’s been in talks with officials about joining the group.

“I expect that at some point in the near future, I’ll be involved with that in some shape or form,” he said Wednesday.

McManus said he doesn’t believe the nation’s criminal justice system is working the way it was intended. Among other things, he said, overcrowded jails is a problem.

He also noted that the incarceration rate in the U.S. “far exceeds” the rates of every other developed country.

“There needs to be a continuing discussion on how we improve the criminal-justice system,” he said.

Reforming mandatory-minimum laws, improving relations between law enforcement agencies and the communities they police, finding alternatives to prosecution — including better mental health and drug treatment — and reducing certain criminal penalties are among the group’s top priorities.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have called for criminal justice reforms for years, but “the missing piece to this is law enforcement,” Chettiar said. “There’s only so much politicians can get done without the support of people on the ground who are executing the laws they’re putting on the books.”

The tough-on-crime policies that permeated past thinking filled jails and prisons across the country with hundreds of thousands of inmates, disproportionately impacting communities of color.

One 2013 study from The Sentencing Project found that one in three African-Americans born that year could expect to spend time in prison, compared with one in 17 white men. The report blamed the discrepancies in part to police strategies that target black men and judges’ harsher sentences for minorities.

“The punishment no longer fits the crime,” the group noted, pointing to initiatives undertaken by states like Georgia, which in 2012 raised felony thresholds for shoplifting and most other theft crimes, programs projected to save taxpayers more than $250 million by 2017.

Since 2007, Texas has been at the forefront of a shift to treatment and rehabilitation programs, from incarceration and punishment initiatives that were enacted in the 1990s in response to skyrocketing crime rates and increasing street-gang violence.

Driven by public fear and political pandering, legislatures in Texas and other states imposed longer sentences for an array of crimes ranging from drug-trafficking and property crimes to sex assaults and other crimes of violence.

Facing multimillion-dollar court fines for overcrowding in its state cellblocks and jails, Texas by the mid-90’s had tripled the size of its prison system in a $1.5 billion expansion that was the largest such growth in U.S. history and left the Lone Star State with the largest state prison system in the free world. For similar reasons, other states expanded their prison systems, as well.

But by the early 2000s, spiraling operating and medical costs and economic downturns that strained budgets in Texas and other states had legislative leaders looking for a new solution. Instead of building three new prisons in 2007, after successfully ramping up probation programs and lowering recidivism rates for low-level, non-violent offenders two years earlier, Texas opted to greatly expand its rehabilitation and treatment programs that diverted thousands of the same types of offenders from prison.

The state’s prison population has gradually started to decline. Approximately 148,000 inmates are incarcerated in Texas prisons, down from more than 156,000 seven years ago.

One irony: a short-lived initiative in the early 1990s by then-Gov. Ann Richards to provide greatly expanded drug treatment for state prison convicts — a program that was overwhelmed by skyrocketing crime rates and costs, and was downsized after tough-on-crime Republicans came into power — found new life and new favor.

Subsequent studies showed that recidivism rates dropped, crimes rates went down and costs began leveling out — a shift that became a national model as other states visited Texas and quickly adopted similar programs.

During that same period, a sex-abuse scandal in Texas’ separate youth-corrections system brought sweeping reforms that included a shift to community-based treatment and rehabilitation programs, instead of having teen-age lawbreakers sent to a remote state lockup. In five years, the population of those lockups dropped from more than 4,000 offenders to about 1,000.